WATER OF LIFE (621 pp.]Henry Morton RobinsonSimon & Schuster ($5.95).
This is a three-generation novel in which the generation is ceaseless, the dialogue deathless, and the drink strong at all times. Novelist Robinson populates his pages with gamblers, gypsies, whores, cutpurses, counterfeiters, country maidens, Mafia men. Harvard professors, necrophiles, lesbians, and good, honest Indiana farmers. He afflicts them variously with lust, greed, chronic childbirth, madness, lung surgery and death by water, gunshot, prolonged beating and Addison's disease. As it is customary for costume novelists to concern themselves also with a certain amount...